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Rebecca Green | SBJ

A Conversation With ... Chris Jarratt

Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder, Revel Advertising

Posted online

When you’re evaluating a brand, what are the first steps?
It comes down to alignment with how you perceive your brand and how it’s perceived either internally or externally by your customers. When we look at it internally, we’re thinking about mission, vision, values, the purpose and what is the culture of your brand? Over the last four or five years especially, talent attraction and retention have become more of a concern with small- to midsize businesses. They’re starting to see the value of the brand not only externally, but now internally. Externally is more about: Do people know you? What is the awareness? The sentiment – how do people feel about you? And then the equity in your brand – do people value it? There’s a number of tools that we use to do that, from coming in and doing a workshop and meeting with key stakeholders. Maybe it’s surveys, focus groups. Maybe it’s some social listening tools to see what consumers are saying. Hopefully there’s some alignment there, but oftentimes there’s not. On the merger and acquisition side, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to work with companies that are going through that process. That’s when you really need to fine-tooth-comb evaluate your brand.

It seems like there are more options than ever to get your message out there with advertising mediums. Where are you seeing growth within ad placements?
Some of the top ones are probably ones that you’re thinking about, people having ownership over their own media through podcasts, but also advertising on digital audio, whether it’s through podcasts or Spotify’s network. Podcasts and that whole area has really blown up this last year. Social media continues to be on the rise, especially with TikTok really becoming so prevalent. It’s really pushing video content to the forefront, and simply its structure is dictating how people view video content. You need to have a quicker message. We’ve probably created more video content for our clients in the last three years than we had all the years prior. One area that we’ve been leveraging a lot is LinkedIn. You can target well on there, especially if it comes to talent and retention. Pound for pound, email is still one of your best return on investments that you can do. Once you get people in your marketing ecosystem, it’s pennies on the dollar to continue to market to them.

Google will begin phasing out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser next year after citing consumer demand for privacy. Cookies have allowed businesses and agencies to learn more about their consumers and audience for decades? How will this impact your industry?
The two main areas that we’re concerned about are [that] it’s going to get trickier to target people, and how we measure things could get a little messier. Third-party data allows you to travel all over where you are with the browser and really kind of hone in on a lot of different things as far as targeting goes. It’s going to really favor the large consumer-facing companies or platforms that have the ability to collect first-party data. So, Google, Meta and Amazon, they have walled gardens of users, and so they’re still able to collect that data, and then people that advertise on that network are going to be able to get more targeted. It’s probably going to make those more valuable platforms. When it’s harder to target, your message becomes more important because you need to resonate. With a creative agency like us, where I feel like we shine is really getting to understand the brands we work with and making sure that creative message resonates and it’s memorable.

Businesses and consumers are facing record-high costs and inflation, and many are predicting a recession on the horizon. How does that change messaging?
Typically in a recession, people are going to pull back, and one of the things you really want to focus on is being trusted. People are a little more skeptical. You want to make sure that you’re being consistent with your messaging. As we look at the potential recession coming in, it could be a kind of a weird recession because we’re coming out of a pandemic into a recession. We have a lot of clients in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Well, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for that industry still. Taylor Swift broke the internet last week trying to do concerts. People want to get out. But there’s a recession maybe coming. Those things are going to butt against each other in an atypical way. It’s going to be a little bit more industry specific. You’re going to have to do a little bit more research on your industry, on your consumer set, and see how the recession is affecting them specifically.

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